From the beginning I wanted to do application programming because I felt my business experience from running the gas station gave me something most programmers did not have — a real understanding of how businesses actually worked and what they needed from software. That was where my interest was and where I thought I could contribute most.

At Modcomp the only available compiler was Fortran, which was a scientific programming language not well suited to business applications. Every time the systems programmers developed a new terminal interface — which happened regularly — all of us in application programming had to spend 2 weeks rewriting existing code to work with it. I could not accept that as an unavoidable cost.

I went to the MIT library and found a book about a Fortran programming technique using tables to direct program logic execution. Instead of using my 2 allotted weeks to rewrite my existing program the standard way, I rewrote it from scratch using this table-driven approach. After that, each time the terminal interface changed it took me only a few hours to make my program work again instead of 2 weeks. I also rewrote the performance-critical parts in assembly language, which made execution significantly faster than what I had achieved with Fortran subroutines.

When Modcomp management found out what I had done they asked me to teach the other application programmers to convert to the table-driven system. When Modcomp Business Systems eventually shut down, Kent Bradley was the only person kept on to support existing customers — and he told me later that he was extremely grateful for the table-driven approach, since updating programs for customers now meant changing table content rather than rewriting code.